


the monster inside of me

by navaan



Category: Arrow (TV 2012), DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV)
Genre: Angst, Background Canonical Character Death referenced, Character Development, F/F, Healing, Hurt/Comfort, League of Assassins - Freeform, POV Female Character, Sexual Content, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-01
Updated: 2016-07-01
Packaged: 2018-07-19 04:43:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,762
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7345345
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/navaan/pseuds/navaan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sara Lance died and came back a monster. She needs something familiar to teach herself control.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the monster inside of me

**Author's Note:**

  * For [geckoholic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/geckoholic/gifts).



The League of Assassins had a code and everyone who entered into the League knew that to keep the world in balance the League too needed order within. You entered the League for life. Sara had known that when she entered and she'd understood it when she had left for the first time; she had also known what that meant and had been ready to face the consequences. The League was not a club you joined and left on a whim. Like family your bonds to it were eternal, even if you found that perhaps you wanted to be more than a good killer.

Very often the people who entered did not have other families left. Loyalties outsie the League were a liability that Ra's could not allow. But many, who hadn't been born to it, came because they had lost someone dear to them and wanted to change the world.

Sara hadn't come to the League for that reason. She had come to the League, because she had been the one lost and by chance she had been found. And every time she moved through her katas with skill and precision, every time she bowed her head to show that she was ready to be sent out, and every time Nyssa looked at her with fire and pride, she knew she had been found. The scared little girl who had scrambled for survival was gone. Sara Lance was still here, but Ta-er al-Safar was acting on her behalf.

She hadn't left the League, because she wasn't grateful, either. But after picking up the pieces of herself and forming them into a woman who was proud and unafraid, there was simply one choice for her. She needed to find herself again for real – and she wasn't going to let her family and home suffer any more. She had never left her home because she wanted to, now she wasn't sure she'd ever again fit in. But at least she could keep Laurel and dad safe.

And although as Ta-er al-Safar she had felt more whole than she had in years, she had still been too fractured to understand that Nyssa loved her for who she was: The fractured person who was struggling to be whole again. Perfect, efficient Nyssa loved Ta-er al-Safar and Sara Lance; the girl she'd found and the woman she was now. She loved her light and darkness equally.

So in the end Sara returned to her side once more, leaving her home to live the of Ta-er al-Safar at the side of the woman who had made her whole once.

And then she died.

And returned broken once more.

But this time Nyssa wasn't there to make her whole.

* * *

On a ship like the Waverider it was hard to keep secrets. They were a group of people who couldn't be more different and who didn't know much about each other, but in the confined space of the timeship, you heard, you observed, you learned. They were all gauging, figuring out their places in this strange group of not exactly heroes.

Sara Lance observed and was well aware that she was observed in turn. It was part of life to be under scrutiny and she had learned how best to make people not see you, not see the true you, not see the strike coming before it hit. The situation was different though. Death had broken some of her control. The Lazarus Pit had brought her back at a price and only the interference of a magician had brought back part of the person Sara had once been.

But the blood lust, the aggression, remained. 

Rip Hunter, who knew all their stories better than they ever would, was the first to tell her, that she was not a monster. But Sara had learned not to trust men who held all the answers.

Len flirted with her and for a thief and bad guy he turned out to be nice enough. “I know someone who builds protective walls of ice, Sara,” he told her after she tried to extract herself from the group for the evening. “Why are _you_ so guarded?”

“Oh, Snart,” she sing-songed. “I'm not a songbird. I'm a ghost and inside of me lives a monster. Beware.”

He studied her with that eerie attentive way of his and then nodded. “If that's what you want to believe. It's easier to believe yourself the bad guy, isn't it?”

She laughed. He would know. “I don't have to imagine it.” It wasn't a lie. There had been blood on her hands long before she'd lost her soul, but there had never been this drive for carnage, the dreams of blood, of her family and Nyssa lying dead at her feet.

No wonder Nyssa had walked away from what she was now. A broken, evil thing.

Snart sat down beside her as if in defiance of her words and she breathed a sigh of relief when Kendra appeared in the doorway. “Can you show me those moves again?”

Control. She needed control. “Gladly, bird princess.”

“Very funny.” Kendra stuck her tongue out at her and they moved to their little make-shift exercising room. That was good. Movement was always what came easy. Muscle memory was so much easier than facing your own darkness.

* * *

Kendra and Ray would be better off without her. She couldn't explain it to them, but she couldn't sit still. Sara Lance was still only half there, and the only place that had ever managed to teach a superficial little air-headed girl from Starling control was the League. But, of course, the League she returned to, years before she was ever found, was a League without Nyssa. Perhaps that was part why Ra's for the first time looked at her with respect.

“You're skills are exceptional,” he acknowledged.

She bowed her head in silent deference. “My Liege,” she said and thought only of the fact that one day soon he would be the father of the person who once had managed to put her back together.

But the League, even without Nyssa, was familiar and safe. Her urges could be used here. She wasn't a monster without control any longer. She was a monster with a purpose.

* * *

She came to love sitting at the helm, only Gideon's guiding voice in her ear, the stars before her. Becoming a pilot and living on a space ship had never been part of her dreams, but it had a meditative quality to it. Sara Lance was doing good. Her moral compass wasn't broken and the bloodlust was under control. And still she had lost so much again. The group she was running with had a noble cause and they were trying to do good, but so far plans had never quite worked out. And instead of being the dead sister, she was now the sister left behind.

“Star City?” she asked when Rip told her where to go today. She had raged at him for not helping her save Laurel. The pain was still raw, an open wound.

“Starling,” he corrected. “Something you should see.”

They walked out without the rest of their friends. There on a lawn her mother sat on a blanket, a picnic basket beside her. Laurel was barely nine years old and she and little Sara were running, laughing.

Between Lian-Yu and the League and coming back from the dead too often, she had forgotten this.

“Thank you,” she said, just as Dinah looked up and, curiously taking note of their attire, looked up tp meet Sara's eyes. She couldn't know who she was looking at, but something in her recognized her own daughter. She nodded. Sara smiled and nodded back.

She was ready to move again. Laurel would never be forgotten.

* * *

Countless fights tempered her steel more. Countless battles won and lost, close calls and easy wins lay behind her, when she finally stepped off the Waverider again. Rip had brought her here as a favor.

There was a girl standing at the edge of a cliff, looking down without blinking, her long, dark wave hair immediately recognizable to Sara.

“Who are you?” little Nyssa asked as she turned around to look at Sara, noting her white uniform.

Sara smiled. “My Liege,” she said and fell to one knee, startling Nyssa. “Perhaps one day your father will tell you stories of a Ta-er al-Safar.”

“He does,” Nyssa said and her eyes went wide. She studied Sara without fear, but with a measure of inbred caution. Perhaps she was counting the years since the departure of the first Ta-er al-Safar and jumping to conclusions about age and immortality. “She's a warrior and I strife to be like her. Strong and independent. You are her?”

“I am, Nyssa, but I'm going to tell you a secret.” She bent lower to whisper: “One day you'll find and save me and I'll be broken and you'll make me whole. And then I am lost, but it's not the end. Just be patient and wait for me. I am your Ta-er al-Safar and one day I'll come home to stand at your side again. Healthy and whole. And together we can do anything.” 

The child blinked. But just like the Nyssa she knew, she wasn't confused. “I'll wait for you.”

And perhaps sometime soon it was time for Sara to go home.

Rip raised an eyebrow at her. “Was this wise?”

“It's training. She will think I was a vision.”

* * *

Pressed together they lay in bed and Sara's hands explored every inch of Nyssa's body until Nyssa moaned and begged. “More?” she asked, before she let her fingers slip lower and give Nyssa the pleasure both of them had been yearning for.

Nyssa gasped and came, grasping Sara's shoulders and arching her back. “Sara,” she sighed. “Sara.”

They snuggled together after, holding each other close. “I knew you'd come home one day. I wish... I'm sorry, for all you had to go through alone. I would have let you rest in peace, but now I can't be mad that Laurel brought you back.”

Sara smiled. Thinking of Laurel always made her sad. Her brave beautiful sister should have had a second chance too. “I had lost myself again and I didn't want to come to you without me.”

“I waited for you, Sara.”

“I know. I'm sorry I took the long way around.” But she wasn't sorry. Everything was in place. She had needed all this to come to this point.

And here she was.

Sara Lance. Human and whole.


End file.
